pathologies of walking (1)

ah, such an ominous title! And yet, this post was prompted by an utterly pleasant Sunday-walk, firmly within the bounds of social propriety.
It was a Brussels- Brontë walk – tracing the literary steps of Lucy Snowe , the not-so-heroic heroine of Villette (Charlotte Brontës great novel about an English girl at a Brussels boarding school (2)).

I’m rather a late convert to group- literary- walks, having always “dearly liked to think my own thoughts” , to imagine my own scenes from books and, obviously, to take my own steps. But now I find these literary walks utterly endearing and uplifting: a group of people of different nationalities and coming from diverse walks of life, having in common only their love of a novel written more than 150 years earlier, taking together a real life walk in the pouring rain around the few surviving landmarks mentioned in said novel.

Thus, for the love of a novel, our little group undauntedly opened its umbrellas, and walked up & down a stretch of wet cobbled street where Lucy/Charlotte may have walked. We piously pored over a map pointing out the “then and now” location of streets. We stood shivering, but alert to the guide’s words, on the windy forecourt of a church where Lucy Snowe/ Charlotte Brontë may have confessed. And we gathered ceremoniously under very green trees dripping with spring rain, close to a kiosk in the park where Lucy/ Charlotte went to an open air concert.

And yet, there ‘s this crucial walk which the little group of Brontë- devotees did not take – the walk which is perhaps most evocative of poor lonely Lucy Snowe’s state of mind. But it’s of course the kind of walk one cannot reconstruct – the aimless walking of one who has no purpose, no companion …. The feverish walking of one who can no longer bear to stay amongst his four walls … who needs to go out, to escape from his inner ruminations. The walk of one who kicks himself out of the door, into the city, to hurl himself amongst strange people & sights, to walk himself into oblivion…

Villette may well be one of the first novels to describe this pathology of walking – pathology...? well, no doubt this kind of obsessive walking is part therapy too: the immersion in movement, the company of streets to drown out the inner buzzing.

So imagine now a long hot summer vacation .... and a shy girl remaining all alone in a boarding school in a foreign city, when everyone else has returned home for the holidays ...:

“At first I lacked courage to venture very far from the Rue Fossette, but by degrees I sought the city-gates, and passed them, and then went wandering away far along chaussées, through fields, beyond cemeteries, Catholic and Protestant, beyond farmsteads, to lanes and little woods, and I know not where. A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly famine. I often walked all day, through the burning noon and the arid afternoon, and the dusk evening, and came back with moonrise. “

Another more recent expert in both the pathology and the therapy of city-walking (and also the deft chronicler of its hallucinations), is Paul Auster (3) – who even manages to write sentences with the feel of a meandering walk:

“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel he was nowhere. [….]

There remained the problem of how to occupy his thoughts […] Quinn was used to wandering. […]. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering therefore, was a kind of mindlessness. “

Compulsion or seduction of walking? Difficult to say…. But for those who are anxious to determine where the frontier between healthy and pathological walking lies, do take WG Sebald’s advise : watch your shoes….. (4)

more about shoes in footnote (4)
(1) pathology
Main Entry: pa·thol·o·gy
Function: noun ; Inflected Form(s): plural pa·thol·o·gies ;Etymology: New Latin pathologia & Middle French pathologie, from Greek pathologia study of the emotions, from path- + -logia -logy
2: something abnormal: a: the structural and functional deviations from the normal that constitute disease or characterize a particular disease b: deviation from propriety or from an assumed normal state of something nonliving or nonmaterial c: deviation giving rise to social ills
(2) Lucy Snowe, an unlikely heroine … Compared to Jane Eyre, brazenly braving all adversities, Lucy Snowe may seem very passive indeed, with all her pondering & pining, her watching & observing. Both Brontë characters do traverse periods of loneliness and isolation, but whereas Jane Eyre bustles with passionate resolve to wrest her share of happiness from a hostile world, Lucy Snowe’s melancholy & sensitive nature rather suffers in resigned solitude. Ah how anguished and paralyzed poor Lucy Snowe is…, and yet how true to herself, how courageously honest and how sensitive … So which is my favorite novel? Well, Jane Eyre has of course the combative spirit of passion & adventure going for it, and the attraction of a proud self-reliant heroine. But it is Villette which I love best , even now still rereading some passages every once in a while. Because Villette is, as its sleeve-jacket rightly says, “one of the greatest fictional studies in our literature, not of self and society, but of self without society.”
(3) The quote is from “City of Glass”, but it’s a recurring theme with Auster
(4) WG Sebald: Vertigo – All’estero “ Early every morning I would set out and walk without aim or purpose through the streets of the inner city […]Although at times, when obliged to lean against a wall or seek refuge in the doorway of a building, I feared that mental paralysis was beginning to take a hold of me, I could think of no way of resisting it but to walk until late into the night, till I was utterly worn out.[…] and I cannot say whether I would ever have come out of this decline if one night as I slowly undressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, I had not been shocked by the sight of my shoes, which were literally falling apart. "

The combative melancholiac’s guide to Spring in general and to the Easter Weekend in particular.

Innocent, naïve sensuousness - that’s the best attitude to deal with April’s cruel mixing of memory and desire (1). So, nothing like going cycling on a balmy spring evening, along the park gates, dazzled by the brilliant green leaves poking through the rusty , mossy bars. And with the sky a deep luminous grey, promising spring rains to stir any remaining dull roots. (it’s a grey so soothing, so lenient…., offering such a calming complement to all those exciting shades of green (2))

Safe immersion in Spring’s relentless blessings can also be achieved during the day, on a sunny lawn, by taking off one’s socks and gently dipping two sets of pale winter toes into the luscious grass. The ensuing (sensuously wriggling) relief forms, together with the obvious sense of ridicule, a sure remedy against any Spring melancholia.

Thus inocculated against malicious Spring stirrings, one can then savor the summer-like release that lets the city unwind on the eve of a long Easter weekend. The streets much emptier than usual and flooded with Spring’s lazy evening sun, people nonchalantly loitering at traffic lights instead of impatiently waiting to cross, music coming from cars’ open windows. The local shop owner sitting at his till, basking in the last sun rays falling through the open door, humming along with a feverishly languorous Arab song on the radio while serving the few customers still having to stock up for the weekend.

Melancholics should however not push their luck during those early Spring days, which may awaken many an unfulfilled and (worse!) unfulfillable longing. For instance, trips to crowded, wired up Easter Holiday destinations (sunny sea-resorts, April in Paris, …. ) are to be advoided. On the other hand, staying at home listening to Bach’s Mattheus-passion may be a very honorable & rewarding occupation but should not be repeated each year (a bi- or even tri-annual frequency seems optimal)(3). Pleasant social intercourse, especially when combined with some healthy outdoorsy activity, is of course highly commendable but should definitely not take up the entire 4 days of a long Easter weekend. (4)

Some travelling however should be done, preferably by train (5). And preferably to a friendly city with a river, an unpretentious city not needing hordes of Easter-tourists to be alive. For combative melancholics living in the Lowlands & vicinity, Liège/Lütttich is an excellent choice.

(I tried it out myself last Saturday, and I can confirm that, even in slightly adverse personal circumstances (5) Liège proves to be forthcoming. It had been a few years since I last had been there, so the arrival came as quite a shock. The old station was simply gone and replaced by an ambitious new high-speed terminal under construction. Impressively soaring perspective lines & vanishing points galore, on the ground & up there in the roof – but the whole concrete & metallic construction did seem a tad megalomaniac. And not really concerned with offering travelers a cozy space.

But I enjoyed the shock of the new, and doted on the multiple endearing improvisations to accommodate travelers during the construction works: from temporary iron bridges, over wooden planks to provisional office-containers sporting incongruously old- fashioned wooden doors-with-handles.
Leaving the terminal-construction site I felt slightly dis-oriented at first, wandering along heaps of rubble of the old station buildings, before recognizing somewhat further off the re-assuring remnants of the old station neighborhood, with welcoming open air cafés.

So there I indulged in this foremost sunny spring activity : sitting on a café terrace, sipping from a drink, pretending to read but meanwhile observing all the goings about. The travelers hurrying to the station loaded with suitcases, the locals sloshing to the convenience store to get their Saturday newspaper and their cigarettes, the quarreling couple, ..... And a few meters further, a man and woman, clad in black leather, speaking American, lazing about, looking very cool & relaxed, surrounded by air travel suitcases including musical instruments cases (one for a bass apparently): black jazz-musicians having played a gig at one of the excellent Liège jazz-joints I presumed. (Which was confirmed when a trendy goatee-beard sporting man crossed the street, shaking reverently the couple's hands and saying admiringly “hey, you were good last night! When are you going back to Chicago? ”) )

But ahum, I digress, back to my Easter travel tips for melancholiacs! When in a friendly city, do program a visit to a local friendly museum. (7) And assuming combative melancholiacs often have a large measure of humanist geekiness, I can warmly recommend an ancient art museum. One where you can eruditely revel in Spring, gazing lovingly at a small, elegant, dancing figure, sculpted in bronze in the 2nd Century AD or so. A swinging figure with liberally fluttering antique draperies, representing a "hora" (seasonal goddess). A figure probably not unlike one of the examples having inspired Botticelli when painting his Prima Vera. (8)

Also, dear combative melancholiacs on an Easter city-trip, do take a stroll around the fountain in one of the local parks! And for the humanist geeks, preferably one with a passable copy of an ancient statue. (The Liège park has a creditable go at the Laocoon, against the background of a lovely spraying fountain).

And my advice regarding brisk river walks in the city of your choice? Well, you being a melancholiac, you will end up near the river anyway …. Walking & walking, gazing at the apartment buildings on the other side of the river, wondering how it would be like to live there. And wistfully gazing along that glistering stream, to the far off hazy horizon, wondering how it would be to walk & walk & walk, all the way up there….

a mixture of motley notes
(1) Ok, so I have already quoted TS Eliot-on-April back in January, so what? The Waste Land
(2) It’s my litmus test for landscape painters throughout the ages: how sensitive are they to greys & greens. Pity the painters indulging brilliantly blue skies only! They miss out on a whole palette of deliciously delicate color combinations. Some examples of painters that do pass the test: Claude Lorrain (he has the additional merit of having introduced luminous grayish haziness in landscape painting), Watteau (with silky greys & greens) , Daubigny, Boudin, Corot, Pisarro, Cézanne. (As to contemporary photographers, I’m of course keenly keeping track of the greys & greens in Roxana’s work )
(3) So please refer to last year’s Easter post for heartfelt ruminations about the Passion.
(4) In all their laudable zeal for well-adjusted sociable behavior, combative melancholiacs should be careful not to overdo the jolly sociability! They should not forget that they do need (and are entitled to) their dose of solitary wandering & contemplating (for which Easter weekends offer the precious free time). Hence, one day of social immersion should suffice.
(5) Train rides of course are replete with memories & desires (& their potential cruelties) ….. – so let me suggest some unfailing stratagems to avoid looking wistfully out of the window for the duration of the entire trip: in my experience one can confidently rely either on the naïve-sensuousness- method ( as evoked at the start of this post) by reveling in the train’s rhythms & smells & sounds & visions. Or on the companionship of an engrossing book (eg Oliver Sacks’ ‘Musicophilia’ ) or of some CD's (eg Magdalena Kozena singing Händel arias, or Fairuz .... yes, to assuage memory & desire's potential cruelties, Fairuz may be the best choice).
(6) Suffering from a mild gastric flu (undoubtedly picked up at work to spoil the weekend) I arrived at Liège station, feeling quite poorly & feeble. So blessed be the “Pharmacie de la Gare” with its highly competent pharmacist, who instantly alleviated my distress by dispensing not only effective anti-flu tablets, but also her genuine concern.
(7) And really, you could do much worse than going to the newly opened Liège museum ‘le Grand Curtius’, which matches the new high speed train terminal in ambition but far outdoes it in user-friendliness! It brings together (and to the light) the collections (which often were not even on display) of several old musty Liège museums (which had their charms though ...). In any case, their riches are now pleasantly presented & with all due art historical care. And the staff, newly hired, is on its best behavior, endearingly enthusiastic in its eagerness to please the visitors.
(8) yep, am reading Aby Warburg right now - so am having a keen eye out for any antique pathos formulae (& for vigorously fluttering drapes in particular!)

Brooding about Byzantium : a dilettante confesses

Unrepentant dilettantism


Perhaps it’s only in art history & aesthetics that dilettantism has been granted a status beyond dubious dabbling. (1) Many a non-academic ‘connoisseur’ looms large in the art world. And the great art historian Panofsky admitted that the “synthetic intuition” needed to grasp art’s intrinsic meaning “may be better developed in a talented layman than in an erudite scholar” .
Because, apart from factual knowledge and erudition , appreciating and understanding art always requires an act of imaginative recreation, which is subjective.

But alas, give people a license to dabble without diligence (2), and they will abuse it. Therefore , also in the art world, earnest art historians have come to detest the exalted devotion of blithely ignorant aesthetes who wallow in their own intuitive sensitivity. (3) (4)

But, despite humbly acknowledging dilettantism’s limits, it was as an unrepentant amateur (5) that I took the train to London to indulge in one of my most cherished but unsubstantiated dilettante obsessions: Byzantium…. (6). And on that train I was defiantly reading Walter Pater, the patron saint of 19th century exalted aestheticism, who wrote so seductively and so misleadingly about art history.
As it has been put aptly: “in the uncertain twilight of Pater’s scholarship cultural history became imaginative misrepresentation”. (7)


"Imaginative misrepresentation"

Imaginative misrepresentation ….. how much of the consoling elegance and cohesion of art history itself is not due to imaginative projection, which offers a pleasing synopsis ex post? How much of the beguiling attraction of art history does not lie in the fact that, using the remaining mute artifacts as props, it pretends no less than to tell us the story of the life of the human mind (“Geistesgeschichte” )?

Winckelmann , the ‘first art historian’, having come under the spell of the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the rare remaining Antique statues, and despairing at how much was irrevocably lost , wrote:
“ […] contemplating the collapse of art […] we […] have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining. But this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals. In this, we often […] believe [we] can see something where nothing exists. […] One always imagines there is much to find. “(8)

And then, Byzantium….! If ever there was a candidate for imaginative misrepresentation! This twilight Roman-Christian empire, flourishing in the Greek East in the wake of the fall of ‘old Rome’. A 1000 years shrinking empire now best known for its defeats: in 1204, the brutal sack of Constantinople by Byzantium’s barbarian westerns cousins who were on a crusading rampage ; in 1453, the pivotal date we all learned at school : Constantinople conquered by Ottoman Turks.

Luxurious Byzantine Byzantium.... Byzantium of the Byzantine Icons….., of which so many, (maybe the best?), were destroyed during 100 years of ruthless iconoclasm, or got lost due to human neglect & vandalism, eagerly collaborating with the destructive processes of nature and time. (9)

Oh I did diligently start reading a ‘real’ historical book about Byzantium, conscientiously tracking the imperial reversals of fortune with its military victories and defeats, with its inventory of administrative and legal achievements, with its economic and sociologic ramifications . And just as diligently, I duly peered, at the London exhibition, into the glass cases which displayed domestic objects, imperial parafernalia, jewels & more jewels and other material remains of the ‘real' Byzantine life.

Mesmerizing folds & golden ribbings

But I must confess that, of this grand medieval civilization that lasted a 1000 years, what has enduringly captured my imagination are folds …. yes the vicissitudes of folds, of “delicate gold striations defining the folds of cloth”. What gave Byzantium a lasting place in my imagination, is the fate of these golden highlights & ribbings in panel paintings & mosaics… (10)

Indeed, something as seemingly futile as how folds of clothing are rendered, is pivotal in any story of the life of the mind – because tracking the fate of these folds, shows how the elegance of graeco-roman anthropocentric and figurative art made way for the “clumsiness” of western-christian schematically-abstract and spiritual art. And it shows how at the same time some of the graeco-roman artistic formulas had some sort of afterlife in the decorative and hieratic conventions of Byzantine art, which in their turn were transformed by Italian painters into a renewed elegant naturalism, announcing the humanist-christian Renaissance.

So Byzantium, for me, is about images….., about the scattered artistic traces it left. Byzantium is about what it salvaged from Antique imagery, and how it transmitted this classical heritage under the form, as it were, of dried food, as mummified conventions that only needed to be hydrated by later Italian artists to spawn a renaissance. (11)

Byzantium is about these imposing hieratic images , about shimmering gold in half-dark domes ….. It is about the seduction of lost splendor as well as of a lost meaning of that splendor. Byzantium is about enchantment and mourning. Byzantium is so seductive for our imagination since so little of authentic early Byzantine art has been left, since we “can only grope for its character from nothing better than the surviving canvases of its imitators” (9)

Byzantium is about all the tragic longings which generations of poets and aesthetes have projected in it. (12) (13)

And as one who has never been to Ravenna, who has never wandered about in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and who has never been to the St Catherine monastery on Mount Sinai, I do solemnly declare being utterly enthralled by Byzantium.




A dilettante’s feverish footnotes
(1) dilettante
Etymology: Italian, from present participle of dilettare to delight, from Latin dilectare — (more at delight) Date: 1748
1 : an admirer or lover of the arts
2 : a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : dabbler
(2) am paraphrasing here an erudite flowervillain
(3) Erwin Panofsky, more sternly this time : “As I have said before, no one can be blamed for enjoying works of art “naively” – for appraising them according to his lights and not caring any further. But the humanist will look with suspicion upon what might be called ‘appreciationism’. He who teaches innocent people to understand art without bothering about classical languages, boresome historical methods and dusty old documents, deprives naiveté of its charm without correcting its errors”
(4) thus the impeccably erudite Warburg detested Bernard Berenson, the flamboyant connoisseur-aesthete. Berenson indeed didn’t have any qualms to venture fanciful attributions without rigorous scholarly evidence but based mainly on “certain intuitions”. And Walter Pater, that other quintessential 19th C aesthete, produced delightfully imaginative essays, which were however “ manifestly lacking […] rigour in matters of fact “.
(5) personally I don’t see the amateur and the professional as competitors - The amateur is just that: “in the best sense of the word, a lover of [the arts and] of learning among the general citizenry “ . (Robert Darnton in a NYRB article). And the amateur will be devoted to his or her domain of predilection in a very personal way. The amateur's devotion is tinged with subjectivity, especially when it concerns a humanistic discipline (as opposed to say physics or mathematics). Because, it is laden with our very personal questions & obsessions that we (the amateurs) come to the humanities.
And in my experience the amateur will gladly accept lessons from the professional and will not mingle in scholarly discussions. But does this mean then that amateurs and professionals can never communicate on an equal level? Well, in matters of taste and personal judgment they can, of course, in their quality of thinking & judging human beings. But much less so indeed in matters of objective , scholarly purport.

****WARNING**** This picture of the humble amateur is not the whole truth though … There is a subterranean Faustian arrogance at play too, the Amateur does entertain a secret universalist yearning …
Yes, there's a hidden hubris of the Dilettante, who, at times, exults in the (deceptive) vastness & swiftness of his intuitive imagination as opposed to the slow & methodic grinding of the toiling specialist ….

(6) Exhibition at the London Royal Academy of Arts: Byzantium 330-1453
(7) Adam Phillips in his introduction to Walter Pater’s “The Renaissance”
(8) J.J. Winckelmann, History of the art of antiquity
(9) Bernard Berenson – Studies in Medieval Painting (which contains not quite scholarly correct articles about Byzantine art, but may nevertheless (or rather : therefore) offer exactly the sort of imaginative reconstruction that serves my own not-quite-corroborated Byzantium-construct…. :
“ Iconoclasts, native rebels, Bulgars and Turks seem to have participated joyously in Nature’s destructiveness […] there are in the east only fragmentary traces of mosaics before 1300 [..] Outside […] a few noted shrines such as those on Mt Sinai. […]
The pictures of eastern origin that we see in the West are all of later date. They are specimens of the mummified art to which we are commonly accustomed to apply the word Byzantine, although they date from a time when the Christian eastern Empire was dying, or dead
Until the great Venetian betrayal in 1204, Constantinople, despite many vicissitudes, was the metropolis of European and of nearer Asia civilization. There is no reason for assuming that traditions of good craftsmanship were ever lost there, as again and again they were lost in the West, or that the ideals of form were dragged down to the barbarous puerilities to which we declined in our darkest centuries. […]
Imagine that all the pictures done in Paris by Frenchmen had disappeared, and that we could grope at their character from nothing better than the surviving canvases of […] imitators”
(10) The “delicate gold striations defining the folds of cloth” Byzantine art
Byzantine art offers the fascinating spectacle of the nimble mixture of surviving graeco-roman naturalistic forms, Christian spiritualism, and Byzantine hieratic & decorative splendor. And one cannot be but moved by the awakening in early 13th century Italian painting, which started transforming these conventional Byzantine golden notations of the folds into something both naturalistic/representative and elegant.
So these Byzantine icons & mosaics with their decorative shimmering gold , with their hieratical, timeless visual incantations beyond earthly reality, not only continued as a barely unchanged & mummified Icon-tradition in the orthodox countries , but also contained the seeds of the Italian Renaissance’s elegant naturalism, harking back to the greco-roman gracefulness. In such a way that John White lyrically notes of this Italian transformation of Byzantine conventions : “
“The complicated linear symbols for the folds are caught, like chrysalids in the very act of transformation, at the moment of their softening into rich, material forms. “

(11) Panofsky : La renaissance et ses avant-courriers dans l’art d’occident – « La tradition byzantine qui, pour reprendre la comparaison immortelle d’Adolf Goldschmidt, a transmis l’héritage classique - y compris bon nombre des ‘pathosformeln’ – à la postérité « sous la forme d’aliments déshydratés que l’on hérite de famille en famille et qui peuvent être rendus digestibles par l’adjonction d’eau et l’effet de la chaleur »
(12) Yves Bonnefoy – Byzance :
« Son impersonnalité, que si pauvrement on lui reproche : elle rêve pour nous
La forme est une écriture qui, dans sa simplification, sa recherche des symétries, peut suggérer une connivence de l’universel et de l’être , où s’efface notre présence - , puis découvrant que ses gauchissements, ses flexions, ses élongations dans le canon de Byzance sont autant de refus de cette rêverie dangereuse.
Un certain faste peut célébrer la transcendance d’un lieu . De même un dénuement conscient de soi peut rappeler la forme à sa charge terrestre, la substance
Et à mi-chemin de ce dénuement et de grands rituels, il faudra définir l’élégance, qui est une des filles de la douleur er , de Ravenne à Mozart, de Botticelli à Tiepolo, hante toutes les œuvres anxieuses de l’Occident. C’est Byzance qui la première a enseigné cette ascèse, qui demande au luxe l’éveil à tous les pouvoirs de nos sens, mais ne vit en ceux-ci que pour y méditer une absence. L’art byzantin, qui a désigné l’absolu, en sait aussi la distance. Il n’est pas, comme parfois Venise et souvent Rubens, l’assez vain déploiement d’une illusion de triomphe. »
(13) WB Yeats :“But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come”

Part III of the angels trilogy : kitsch & misanthropy

I ‘d better bring this fluffy angel stuff to its close now. Not good for my street credibility at all. Although, frankly, angels dó belong to the streets, as firmly as rap-artists and hard-boiled detectives. Where else but on these mean streets, will a solitary wanderer find accompaniment in many an angelic statue?
Sure, angels are kitsch. So what, just another argument for their non-elitist street credibility! Kitsch, after all , does address (exploit?) the most genuine & heartfelt of human longings.

Yeah – angels are definitely all-inclusive symbols and can be substantiated with quotes ranging from Pico della Mirandola (1) to Robbie Williams (2) !

But there’ s something very pessimistic and misanthropic about angels too…. There’s a whole brooding tradition which pitches angels & their qualities against the woeful limitations of mere men & women. Montaigne did that (3), Pascal (4) did it and even Robbie Williams (2) does it. (5)

Then again – angels in the Robbie Williams version are of course nothing but fantasies of outcasts looking for something to fix their spurned affections on. But darn you reader, if you’re going to be disdainful about that. Lookin’ fer sumtin’ an someone ta love in an unfriendly world – why, this is not merely about teenage tearjerkers!

Anyone who, for whatever reason, does not quite fit into the dominant discourse of his or her environment, knows the dilemma - either go for the full integrity of the self, go for the self-assertion of the right to be and to be as one is(6). No compromises. And remain a proud misanthropic minority of one.

Or compromise, be selective in what you show, do not flaunt the full self. Accept being loved not for your full self but rather despite your true self (and for everyone’s sakes, don’t be bitter about that). And (the single redeeming feature of this charade), seize the opportunity (however warped, however imperfect) to love back.

As James Baldwin movingly wrote (7) , in an altogether different political context of revolt against white Western dominance, (as if he had to justify any lapse in unwavering aloofness vàv the dominant system):

“Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it”.

fluttering footnotes
(1) See comments to part II of the Angel Trilogy
(2) See comments to part I of the Angel Trilogy
(3) « [les hommes], au lieu de se transformer en anges, ils se transforment en bêtes, au lieu de se hausser, ils s’abaissent » - « [men] instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts, instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves »
(4) “L'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête. » - “man is neither angel nor beast, and as ill-luck would have it, he who strives to be like an angel, acts like a beast”
(5) Now, quite apart from my own angel-spielerei here – and speaking as the earnest humanist I am: Montaigne may be more of a pragmatic & tolerant humanist than the crypto-catholic Pascal… Indeed, to Montaigne man has his dignity, precisely as man, i.e. as neither angel nor beast. As he states in the introduction to his essais: “ ma conscience se contente de soi, non comme de la conscience d’un ange ou d’un cheval, mais comme de la conscience d’un homme » - « my conscience will stick to itself, not as the conscience of an angel, nor as that of a horse, but as the conscience of a man” - But on the other hand, how modern this observation of Pascal, that a fundamentalist striving for absolute virtue turns men into monsters …
(6) Think I am paraphrasing Pat Barker here.
(7) Found the quote in a New Yorker review

solicitous angels

Its melange of naivete and erudition (1), yes that may well be what I love best about art history.

This naivete is to be found in even the most sophisticated art historian, in as much as he or she can’t help being aesthetically and sentimentally moved by a work of art. (2)
Apart from some sour iconophobic postmodern specimens (3), I haven’t yet read an art historian who didn’t at some point lapse from scientific erudition & distance into genuine love for the art works they research.

More, art historians’ sheer devoted erudition can be endearingly naïve. Meticulously tracking down the ancestry or the afterlife of a certain image throughout the ages, accumulating documentary evidence from musty archives: what could be more devoid of utilitarian cynicism? What could be a greater testimony to that discredited humanistic notion that the evolving formal expressions of human concerns have a value as such, even after the societies that have spawned them have collapsed. (4)

But still, there’s the question – how much cultural background information do we need to process in order to properly enjoy a work of art. And what is “properly enjoying”? Is it about grasping the “meaning” of a work of art, recreating the initial intention of the maker? (5) Is it about formal aesthetical enjoyment? Is it about a naive, uneducated emotional response? Or do I need to be familiar with the bible and with medieval scholastic thought & iconography to appreciate a 12th century relief from a French cathedral? (6)

Did I pin the above image on my kitchen wall because of its religious significance? Because I like to be reminded of the angel-assisted resurrection of the Virgin Mary while devoutly drinking my morning tea?
Or because, in general, I dote on statues of winged creatures gathered around a dead body?

Eh, no, that’s not it. Well then, why do I love this image?

Oh, because I found it in a second-hand book , a lovely bundle of essays by the French art historian Emile Mâle who at the turn of the century set out (not without French-chauvinistic and Christian-religious zeal) to restore the fame of French roman-gothic imagery.
And because he wrote so engagingly and affectionately about these swift & gentle angels. (7) .
And because this tympanum relief was so expertly sculpted by an anonymous artist in the 12th Century.
And mostly I love this image, because, in that tumultuous & harsh age, someone took the pains to lovingly represent an image of unalloyed gentleness & solicitude.

suitably naïve notes
(1) self-consciously post-modern readers may now sigh and click on to less naive blogs
(2) Roland Recht in « L’historien de l’art est-il naïf ? » :
« Le spectateur peut se trouver place à différents degrés de “naiveté”, à savoir d’illusions sur la plus ou moins forte implication de son propre équipement culturel dans l’appréhension des œuvres du passé »
But the art historian would then not be naive, because he is aware of the cultural distance, and should be able to dissociate naive aesthetic enjoyment from a cultural & intellectual interpretation of the work.
« Une ligne de démarcation entre une forme « sentimentale » de l’appréhension de l’œuvre d’art et une forme intellectuelle qui se définit (entièrement) par la conscience de l’histoire sous sa forme la plus élémentaire : la conscience de la distance »
(3) A sure sign of this sourness is the lack of reproductions/images in these postmodern art history books, which excel in ironical and conceited meta-discourses-about –the- historical - art historical-discourses
(4) E Panofsky in “the history of art as a humanistic discipline” : “from the humanistic point of view human records do not age"
(5) E Panofsky, Ibidem. "Thus, in experiencing a work of art aesthetically we perform two entirely different acts which, however, psychologically merge with each other into one Erlebnis: we build up our aesthetic object both by re-creating the work of art according to the “intention” of its maker, and by freely creating a set of aesthetic values comparable to those with which we endow a tree or a sunset
[…] the sensual pleasure in a peculiar play of light and color and the more sentimental delight in « age » and « genuineness, » has nothing to do with the objective, or artistic, value with which the sculptures were invested by their makers. "
(6) I’d like to refer here to all the libraries which are filled with highly enjoyable erudite tomes about this ‘what is art’ question. But, sorry, I really can’t go into all this right now. I have to leave for work in about 1 hour and, well, the whole point of this post was just to reproduce a beloved image of solicitous angels, so I’d better get on now.
(7) Emile Mâle - Art et Artistes du moyen âge : recueil d’articles publiés à des dates s’échelonnant de 1897 à 1927. La première édition est de 1927, la quatrième est de 1947.
The reproduction is from the essay about « Le portail de Senlis et son influence »
« Puis, les anges viennent ressusciter ce corps sacré et le tirent doucement du tombeau.[…] La résurrection du corps de la Vierge par les anges est une scène nouvelle dans l’iconographie religieuse et pour laquelle [les artistes de Senlis] n’avaient aucun modèle : ils en ont fait un chef-d’œuvre de vie et de grâce . […]La belle pensée de Senlis .[…] C’est à Senlis que se forme l’iconographie de la résurrection […] de la Vierge . La légèreté, l’allégresse des anges de Senlis […] ».

while updating my CV

Updating one’s Curriculum Vitae is nothing but a banal act of prudence, adapting to these uncertain times. While doing so, you’re obviously not supposed to ponder in earnest the course of your life, and even less should you start wondering about what that life really amounts to. But staring at the neatly unbroken sequence of Dates and Facts, resuming Work Experience and Education and Skills, one can only conclude (with bewildered puzzlement): this is not it, this is not it at all, my life has flown into another channel .... (1)

And this is not just about the evident difference between public and private life, not just about the fact that a CV will not list how people came and went, how loves were found & lost and found & lost again. It is about the amazing fact that a CV does not give the slightest hint of one’s sense of self , does not give a single clue to one’s inner life (be it of the mind or of the soul).

Imagine then a thematic CV, built around one’s defining insights, passions & obsessions – a CV full of objective information diligently based on say, significant evidence found in one’s cupboards & book-cases – such as fading photos with pin-holes testifying to a former personal iconic status; such as doubly & triply -underlined sentences in books, ….

A prominent theme in such a CV of mine would surely have to be “Angels”, “Angels” in their most poignant sense of atheist longing of course. The available evidence might point to a certain sentimentalist & kitschy aesthetic streak in youth
- but all in all, what sets the tone of the theme is rather the somber & knowing reflective-ness of angels, their powerless sympathy with vainly striving humans.

Chronologically Wim Wender’s film “Der Himmel über Berlin”/ “Wings of desire” has to feature first on the CV ( with the mention it is the only film I ever went to see three times in the same week, & with the mention I saw it at age 22, just before I had to plunge headlong in the work-experience as detailed on the official CV).
Oh, it was all there – humans and their catastrophic history, and their eternally clashing or frustrated desires, and their loneliness, and their longings.

And the melancholy sense of this human condition which only the contemplative, the irrelevant members of society truly have.

Thus, seeing and pitying human drama & comedy is the task of powerless , eternally silently murmuring angels. The task of angels, because humans are too wrapped up in their own present battles – too busy preparing the future.

Yes – it was all there (2) , and this poignant image of the powerless, horrified and sympathizing angel has accompanied me for the next twenty years. And surely it is no coincidence that all of my most cherished writers and artists did have something to say about angels ... Like the perfect sentence to resume our dependence on angels as our non-judgmental witnesses of last resort, I found it somewhere in the works of Anna Blaman (3): “only the powerless attentiveness of sympathizing angels”.

Later of course, I could feel challenged by the Rilkian despair that not even angels would hear us: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? “ (4)

And then, ah, the encounter with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, which does merit a lengthy quote :

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (5)

Only angels can thus bear to view & remember history as this catastrophe of human suffering. Only angels, or perhaps also some rare melancholy contemplative humans (the kind of irrelevant individuals which are disqualified anyhow for the optimist task of building the future).

So it’s clearly in this sense that I interpret Benjamin’s insight of history “ as a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly”. (6)

Now I shall refrain from a brief history of angels in art (7), and only quote the very latest acquired angelic reference (for which I have to thank a certain flowervillain ) : here’s Gombrich on a statue by Anna Mahler:

“ [..] the entrance of a cemetery for which she created a model twenty-four years ago: the erect figure of an angel standing on a high square pillar, wiping his tears with one of his wings - an austere vision, utterly devoid of sentimentality”

But what on earth set off this pathetic angelic post? A CV??? Yes, and the moral musings inevitably produced by these dire times.
More specifically, the growing realization that in the practical world, wanting to hold high moral values of human sympathy and wanting “to stand guiltless” in fact condemns one to irrelevance and powerlessness. ( And people may even despise those who have not the power to help them).
What a choice – either compromise on tender moral feelings, play the game and be rewarded with at least some relevance in the world (including the power to, maybe just maybe, right some of the wrongs).
Or stand unwaveringly guiltless and therefore renounce any position of real power in the world and so be condemned to “powerless sympathy” … (8).

CV’s don’t carry footnotes, do they?

(1) Paraphrasing Anna Achmatova
(2) Not all was there : I don’t remember for instance much insistence on angels’ androgyny . Angels not being trapped in human genetics, they’re of course neither male nor female. An d their androgyny is obviously integral to their impotence/ barrenness, which in turn guarantees their disinterested attentiveness : indeed, they’re not propelled by selfish genes bent on reproduction.
(3) Anna Blaman: Dutch writer, active in the 40s & 50s – I don’t know whether she’s still read today – I suspect she’s far too pathetically-earnestly existential for our ironizing times. Here’s the quote (as I remember it, I couldn’t track it down) in Dutch: “ Alleen de machteloze belangstelling van sympathiserende engelen”
(4) It is such a strong line that I have to quote it “jeder engel ist schrecklich”, but clearly it does not at all enter in my personal iconology of boundlessly empathizing angels
(5) From Benjamin’s “Theses on the philosophy of history” as compiled in Illuminations
(6) Straying from angels to melancholy writers such as W. G. Sebald and Orhan Pamuk – at the core of their work there is this same reflective and pitying sadness, a sadness of knowing too much, a sadness of too much moral non-judgmental sensitivity, too much understanding while “speaking of very ugly matters” .
(7) Though what a history that is!!!! The little shrieking & crying & hand-wringing angels of Giotto (as described by Proust), the grave Renaissance angel-musicians, the many impetuous Annunciation angels with fluttering wings , the sensuously swinging angels of Bernini, the angel accompanying Tobias on his winding road, Dürer’s terrible angels, not to mention the many weeping angels at graves, and the irreverent little fat putti so far removed from both heaven and hell …
8) a good occasion to quote from Pamuk's Snow (that sublime, melancholy, moving, kind, desperate novel): "an honest and well-meaning man, like those Chekhovian characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life - full of melancholy"

Kant in the Boardroom

Poor Kant! Our foremost western philosopher, so proud of his rationally determined moral imperatives. And yet, in any busy & conceited Boardroom he’d be derided as an irrelevant irrational moralist. Just imagine that board-members, before an important business decision, would not only demand assurance regarding profitability and compliance with legal, fiscal and operational constraints but would also test the decision on its obedience of the Kantian imperative: “ Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”

Glad I made you laugh. The “business of business is business” , isn’t it (1). Of course, any successful organization, to ensure its survival and growth, is interested only in what people can contribute to its business ends, and not in their intrinsic worth (whatever that may be). If people don’t perform, they’re out, however good as persons they may be, however great the suffering of being sacked (2) may be. Idem, if a business line would no longer be profitable, then you have to close units down and “make people redundant”.
And “we” all accept that, knowing that the success of our western business models depends on a “rational allocation of resources as dictated by the market” . And in the end, so the reasoning goes, everyone is the better off if resources (ie people and capital) are put to profitable use.
Surely we don’t want wasteful soviet-style inefficiency (or do we)? Surely we prefer economical “creative destruction” which ensures that obsolete activities make way for brave new & innovative industries . And yet, in this “rational allocation” game, it is clear that (all too) often people are not treated as an end, but merely as a means.
So: are we immoral? Or was Kant wrong?

But perhaps we can still wriggle out of our moral dilemma if we formulate Kant’s imperative differently: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”.
This one does permit us to point to a greater collective good down the road, one that would more than compensate for the individual cases of ‘using people as a means”. So we could say it’s just an economic game that we as a society have collectively agreed upon. And each of us individually, by signing a labor contract, accepts the rules of this game. Plus, modern society does try to smooth out the worst effects of this ‘being used as a means’: by sets of labor laws, social protection, redundancy pay etc.

So neither we nor Kant should worry about our business customs: it’s all about a rationally calculated, limited suspension of morality to get the job done. And having qualms about that is against the company’s and the society’s greater good.

Being rational in business terms would then mean you have to suspend your natural emotions of sympathy for your fellow-man so as to be able to take a decision that takes into account only objective factors of performance and suitability to the company’s goals. Yuk. This sounds awful, doesn’t it?
And yet, if I would present this differently, it would sound not horrendous at all but only just and reasonable. Here we go: suppose that you’re a team’s supervisor and that you would leave in place a blatantly incompetent team-member because you feel personal sympathy for him or her: this would be sheer nepotism or favoritism that would be rightly resented by the rest of the team….

So for the time being, let’s leave it at this: by presenting things in black and white, we won’t get anywhere, this is yet again a case where “being good” is a matter of striking a balance, of pursuing ends as efficiently as possible, but while respecting certain minimum standards of human dignity.

Leave it at this???? While we’re living in a time that has exposed the Great Geniuses of Finance, those eminently Rational Allocators of Capital, as incompetent at best and as crooks at worst? A previous post circled around the benefits and risks of greed. And it ascribed the current economic catastrophe mainly to weak regulation failing to keep excessive greed in check.
But maybe one should question further the dominant economic paradigm that equates “Good” = “rational” = “ efficient pursuit of self-interest and greed”. Perhaps one should not meekly accept a definition of rationality in which there is no room for moral feelings or for sympathy.
Perhaps it is this one-sided definition of rationality that got us into this incredible mess in the first place. (3)

Time for a bit of cool-headed, objective analysis. Greed is an emotion, right? Fear is an emotion, right? Greed and fear are powerful primitive emotions having evolved very early on to ensure personal survival. OK, and survival = good = rational. That’s how the reasoning goes.
But! Later on in the evolution moral feelings of sympathy and a sense of justice (4) have evolved too, probably because a sense of community and trust allow people to collaborate, which is no mean evolutionary advantage.
And as Adam Smith himself (thé proponent of self-interest as leading principle) has always pointed out, moral feelings of sympathy for one’s fellow-man are needed to avoid the excesses of greed.

A very interesting blog post argues that the current state of huge global companies does no longer permit the natural checks that spontaneous human sympathy might place on selfish greed, because neither CEOs nor flashy traders ever actually see the people impacted by their decisions. Hence, a structural absence of natural sympathy would explain why the greed-bubble could reach such horrendous proportions.

So lo and behold – perhaps we really should not settle for anything less than a redefinition of economic rationality : Good = rational = “the efficient and just pursuit of self-interest, judiciously balancing the emotions of greed, fear, justice and sympathy”. Granted, not the pithiest & sexiest expression ever. …..

But apart from monstrous formulations, the point I do want to insist on: we should no longer accept being ruled by a concept of rationality that is based only on the most primitive urges of greed and fear, and that discounts as irrelevant and irrational our moral feelings and our sense of justice.

Perhaps it’s bit rash for a humble Sunday Blogger to just ditch ruling economic paradigms like that and to pretend to redefine economic rationality itself. So let’s go for a less grand example.

Let’s present a wholly fictitious (5) small scale boardroom drama (to keep in style). Suppose the members of the board of a small subsidiary of a larger group, are invited by the chief commander of this large group to validate his decision to fire the boss of the small subsidiary. The chief commander, of course, is made of steel , does not ever come back on decisions and does not suffer opposition gladly. The board members of the subsidiary are all employees either of the subsiduary or of another entity of the Group (so in the end all subordinated to the chief commander).
The case against the small subsidiary boss, who has a 10 year record of good management and is widely respected , is presented by the chief commander: no fraud, no obvious incompetence but some petty acts of assertive independence and so yes, clearly a matter of clashing characters.

There are those who say it is rational to vote for dismissal of this boss, as asked by the chief commander. There is the personal risk of irritating the chief commander, there is the fact of going against an order of a superior and the decision has been taken anyhow.
Abstention would then be irrational, because it goes against one’s own self-interest in the strict sense and has no impact anyhow. A personal assessment of the presented evidence would be futile and a sense of justice should not enter into the decision, because, again, that would be irrational.

Here I want to yell (yelling ever so demurely & ever so rationally, of course): those “rational followers of the chief commander" are wrong, they delude themselves, they are entirely mistaken about the rationality of their decision : theirs is a decision wholly inspired by fear (and maybe greed too).
And over the ages , it’s that kind of allegedly rational decisions (which abandon personal responsibility and stifle the own sense of justice) that have gotten us in the deepest trouble.

a rationalized set of footnotes
(1) This brilliantly alliterating & deep phrase was coined by the eminent economist Milton Friedman
(2) the psychological suffering of being fired ranks in the top of the stress factors, together with severe illness, divorce, loss of a beloved one etc.
(3) Lovely Wikipedia primer on “rationality”
(4) they are located in a “later” part of the brain
(5) An enlarged opinion, if you will …. “a sensus communis” - Yes, just like Kant’s aesthetical judgment that wants to claim universality.
(6) Any resemblance with real life situations or persons is of course entirely accidental

"Ich bleibe dennoch. Es giebt immer Zuschaun"

"The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which standpoint the Duino Elegies may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility."

"a power of resistance of quite another kind"

April is the cruelest month (1) , but January may well be the gloomiest. So let that be my excuse for a darkly brooding post, about vast vacuities , sinister seas, gory crucifixions and an utterly illegitimate use of Kant’s definition of the sublime.

Sitting here safely at my desk on the third floor, with a banal view of backyards, rooftops and windows, all of them easily comprehended by even the dullest of sensibilities, I might just have the right set of mind to be awe-struck by the image of a dark sea, of a stark vastness swallowing the very edges of the world. Partly I may feel terrorized by this infinity (2) which my senses cannot grasp, and yet...., this image gives me delight.... A paradoxical aesthetical delight, in spite of the inadequacy of my senses to comprehend this formless vastness.

The venerable Kant explains that our mind then experiences the sublime, which is a form of mental delight precisely because that wayward mind of ours feels somehow proud that it can conjure up this idea of infinity, that it can have ideas that transcend the limits of our naïve sensibility. (3) “[the feeling] is sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving a higher purposiveness”.

And what about the feeling of sublimity we experience when we see nature’s elements fearfully unchained? Again the sublimity does not reside in the sensuous objects as such, which are merely horrible, but in our mind which links them to a ‘higher’ human moral faculty. Says the undaunted closet scholar Kant, about mighty & fearsome natural phenomena : “[…] provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of the vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.” (4)

So the feeling of the sublime is altogether a more ambiguous and complex feeling than the obviously pleasing feeling of the beautiful. The “beautiful charms”, and all one needs are well-honed senses, taste and a freely, dis-interestedly playing imagination. But “the sublime moves”, and requires more of us than taste & imagination, it also appeals to our faculty of ideas, to our moral feelings. So: “The sensations of the sublime exert the powers of the soul more strongly” (5)

Thus far a well-intentioned (albeit crudely amateurish) summary of Kant’s distinction of the sublime from the beautiful in aesthetical judgments. So what’s with the illegitimate use I announced? In fact I must confess I had always seized upon this notion of the sublime to explain the aesthetical appeal of art works that definitely are not charming but are bloody well moving. And actually I must find that Kant’s analysis of the sublime only relates to the sublime in nature, not in works of art. (6)

But oh well, unhindered by any methodological qualms I will now pass on to the gory crucifixions (also as announced) and qualify them as sublime.

Take Grünewald’s famous Crucifixion for instance. How can we bear to look at it? Suffering depicted in its most gruesome physical aspects. A bleeding man nailed to a cross, surrounded by a stark, vast darkness. Isn’t it just a repulsive image that offends our senses & our finer sensibilities?
And yet, we stand in awe in front of it, we indeed experience something of the sublime. Because, beyond the sensibly repulsive, this image moves us, speaks to our moral faculties that are roused to pity. And it evokes ideas of redemption of human suffering that we may find consoling (religious ideas in which the faithful at least may find consolation, and in which non-believers are moved to recognize a human all too human longing for redemption of unredeemable sufferings).

But still, again, how can we bear to look at it without horror? Well, of course, it’s not we, nor one of our loved ones, writhing on that cross. More, it’s simply not real. A photo of a real life torture would be horrendous to look at. No way we could be looking at such a photo and enjoy the disinterested deployment of our faculties of pity. We would have to act, we would have to do something – we would be under the full horrible stress of facing real life suffering. With Grünewald’s crucifixion, we’re in the safe realm of mere mental representation.
There is a message of suffering, but it is delivered not without sweeteners. (7) There is beauty in that contrast of the red mantle with the white mantle against a black background. There is a moving musical melody in that duet between the fainting Mary and the compassionate John (8) . There is a god given sense and a promise of ultimate redemption delivered by the religious sermon ( the lamb of god carrying our sins, the son of god dying on the cross for us etc. ).

Humankind cannot bear much reality (9). We want artistic beauty and/or religious sense to transform the ugliest aspects of the suffering. In fact we always want our tales of suffering duly packaged: in stories where heroics redeem the suffering, or stories where human dignity and love ultimately prevail over hardship, or in tragedies of fate that with their Greek necessity and ultimate understanding of one’s fate at least spare us the demeaning meaninglessness of most suffering, the revolting meaninglessness of the accidents, the violence , the maladies which are blindly inflicted upon us. So - “the bitterness of greatest grief cannot be expressed by art” (10).

So: away with this foul irresponsible art, however sublime ? Away with all safely experienced catharsis? Away with this artificial outlet for pent up emotions? Shouldn’t we instead do something (take political action, become a medical doctor, etc).

It’s no use to oppose art to action. Of course art is artificial. Of course art shan’t save the world. But, especially in a world without an all-seeing god, humankind is entitled to a mental realm where we tempt to make some sense of the human condition, and where we can find shared forms of mourning and pitying.
We’re entitled to a realm where we are moved by Grünewald’s crucifixion, although we know fully well that the world is full of sufferings that will never find a Grünewald to express them. Art is just another kind of power of resistance, one which we also need. (11)

futilely resisting footnotes

first the image credits:
Caspar David Friedrich; Monk by the Sea


Grünewald's Crucifixion (this webpage actually quotes from Gombrich, but without giving him the credits)

then the musing-credits:

(1) he was so good at that, TS Eliot, coining phrases that acquire their own autonomous afterlife
(2) "le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie" (Pascal)
(3) This is how Kant phrases it: “The sublime, in the strictest sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which although no adequate presentation is possible, may be aroused and called to mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement)
(4) Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
(5) Kant – Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(6) “If the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (unmixed with any teleological judgement which, as such, belongs to reason) […] we must not point to the sublime in works of art, where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement)
(7) “the emotion of the sublime is stronger than that of the beautiful, but that unless the latter alternates with or accompanies it, it tires and cannot be so long enjoyed”
(8) no wonder the Grünewald crucifixion can be found on the cover of Bach-cantata CD’s
(9) yet another of those TS Eliot phrases
(10) said by a Valerius Maximus, as quoted by Lessing in his Laocoön

(11) Granted, not quite the most representative out-of-context Kant-quote to head this post. I suppose I liked its hesitant ambiguity, which may be the only tone suitable to musings about art and unpleasant realities.

winter light

Time: quite early on a Saturday morning during the Holiday season.
Weather: temperature well below zero; a clear sky.
Setting: a train rattling through Brussels’ industrial outskirts.
Mood: temporarily elated.

Ah, early morning frosty winter light…. Slowly illuminating a pale blue sky with the faintest of pinkish glows – and suffusing the roofs & upper parts of buildings with a warm coppery radiance. The kind of light that gets even the grimiest industrial landscape smoldering & glimmering. Riding a train through such a wintry limpid atmosphere is a pure delight. One could spend hours gazing out of the window.

Except that there’ s also a book demanding my attention.

A serious book, by a serious writer, deserving my full serious attention!

Hmmm – how nicely the sun-light is refracted by the book’s rough paper . Shall I hold the book more upright, to capture all of the light streaming in? Or perhaps I should just tilt the book a bit to the right? And what if I lay it like that, obliquely on the little table? Look - it’s made of brittle golden parchment, this book. Soon it’ll be set ablaze! Oh…… now the train has taken a bent, the sun’s gone and there’s the plain black-lettered pale paper again. (photo’s shot: 11 - pages read: 2)

I have to change trains in Tournai – where the platforms are deserted, far too freezing cold , so all the waiting passengers huddle together in the station hall. It’s a large 19th century, bulky station hall, with many rows of arched & pillared windows. No doubt meant as a tribute to Tournai’s great Romanesque cathedral, unless it was specifically built to celebrate the generous patches of golden light on the red-tiled floor?
A few minutes before my train arrives, I get outside, walking shivering up & down the platform and watching the strange movements of a girl on the opposite, sun-flooded platform. What is she doing? Gliding forward, then stepping back, waving her arms, now feinting something like an attack, then almost doing a pirouette.
Oh, I see, to fend off the cold she’s fencing with her shadow!

From Tournai it’s only a short ride to Lille, in the North of France. When I first went there, almost 15 years ago, it was still a struggling town, uncertainly looking for a new life beyond its decaying industrial past. Since then it has become quite a confident, trendy city linked by fast trains with London and Paris. It has spruced up its historical centre, bubbles with shops & restaurants & bars, and has attracted many service industries & lots of cool folk.

But something of the vagueness & wistfulness of past glories, something of the tedium of decline, can still be sensed in the smaller towns surrounding Lille. Especially when taking the tramway to Roubaix, clattering through a sub-urban landscape now mercilessly & frostily lit by a glaring white sun. There is the fading glamour of early 20th century art-deco houses, mansions alternating with humble workmen’s houses. Then a non-descript post-industrial landscape with gaudy shopping malls surrounded by vast asphalted parking spaces. And finally, sturdy Roubaix itself, with its weighty decaying bourgeois-industrial heritage. But it’s now definitely much neater and more smugly middle-class than 15 years ago - the grime and the crumbling have mostly gone.

And yet, there’s still this air of provincial desolateness, of relative poverty. Or is this because, on this icy-cold Saturday between Xmas and New Year, people either stay at home or have flocked to the cozy shopping delights of Lille? Anyway, it’s not the merry-go-round (with only a few lonely kids on it), so utterly lost in the white winter glare of a large empty square, that will bring joy. Nor the freezing wind from the east, which blows scraps of papers through empty & vainly Xmas-lit streets. And the festive red carpets on the pavements only serve to highlight the pathetic lack of passers-by.

Most cafés & restaurants are closed, so it’s in a rather grubby sandwich bar that I replenish calorie reserves & warm my icy hands at a mug of hot tea. And there I decide that, at minus 3 ° C, aimless wandering about in desolate towns is perhaps not a brilliant Holidays idea.
And so I resume my voyage to find the Northern Light.

Because that was the true destination of this trip: an exhibit of Nordic painters in the Palais des Beaux Arts of Lille.

Readers of this blog know it is my firm conviction that a painter’s sensitivity to light is inversely correlated with his or her daily exposure to sun. It is light deprivation which makes artists attentive to the faintest variations in intensity & quality of light. Hence it are the painters of the North that can make us fall in love with what little light they get to see, not the sun-flooded Italians (except perhaps the Venetians , undoubtedly because of that strange lagoon-haze which filters their sun light).

And in my quest for Northern light I am not disappointed …. I can bask all I want in Nordic crispy crystalline light – refracted & reflected in snowy landscapes, or surreptitiously gliding over a wall, or so quietly shimmering at a window sill. The soothing stillness of winter light, whether it be outside or inside.

(But perhaps also the numbness of winter light? …. “as freezing persons recollect the snow” ….. also the oppressive stillness of winter light?.... “darin der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt”…. )

When I leave the museum, the city sparkles in the violet hour – an abundance of electric lights have gone up , mixing their glow with the purest indigo radiance coming from a frosty sky. And for a few dazzling minutes the world remains suspended in this violet hour, hovering between day & night, between city lights and luminous sky.

Soon the city lights win out, profusely pouring out of shop & café windows, glittering & twittering in decorations everywhere. People are thronging in the streets, cafés and restaurants are crammed full. Full of people eating & drinking & shouting & chattering to keep the cold dark night away. So, high time to seek refuge again in a train & a book.